Fire flickers on bare stone. Your spear is sharp. Your prey is hunting you. This is Far Cry: Primal, an intriguing inversion of the series formula.

Where previous games were about modern man rediscovering the savage within, Primal flips the concept, making the protagonist, Takkar, a caveman. After losing his hunting party, Takkar travels to the valley of Oros to found and then build up a new tribe. With the new setting the gameplay has changed, guns are gone and combat has more of a melee focus, while Takkar can tame Oros’s many predators to help him explore or go on surreal spirit quests from his tribe’s shaman.

All of which makes Primal solid, enjoyable and to an extent even fascinating, but it feels like DLC rather than its own game. The promise of caveman savagery and a wild new setting is just not delivered by the gameplay. The new elements feel like somewhat token additions; under the hood, Primal is really just another Far Cry 3 with big, meaty chunks ripped out. PH

With Nintendo busy crafting the next instalment of the evergreen Zelda series, the decade-old Twilight Princess receives the HD treatment to fill the gap. Though not as timelessly elegant as Wind Waker, Twilight Princess is still a beautiful game, and one expertly restored. The tone echoes the twilight theme, and the player’s journey is peculiar and illusory as you flitter between Hyrule and the ethereal twilight realm.

As with the Wind Waker revisit, menus and controls have been enhanced to utilise the second screen, and quests have been streamlined to trim the fat from the original release. The exclusive new Cave of Shadows dungeon, however, slightly disappoints, with 40 waves of enemies supplanting the traditional complex puzzle design. Twilight Princess stands as one of Link’s most expansive outings, and what it lacks in originality it compensates for with polish, heart and superb design fundamentals. RH

Talorel is a fallen angel, but not in the damned sense. Instead, tricked out of paradise and into 19th-century England with damaged wings and a malfunctioning halo, he must find a way back “upstairs” while avoiding a demagogic inquisition that would, ironically, put him to death for heresy.

Narratively, Heaven’s Hope could be a wonderful examination of religion and theocracy, and to its credit, it tries. Unfortunately, everything else about this point-and-click adventure undermines those efforts. From its puzzles, ranging from simplistic and banal to maddeningly illogical, to its dreadful attempts at humour, this is more hellish than heavenly. Localisation from the original German suffers too, with an appallingly stilted English dub and subtitles replete with typos.

There is still a place in the games market for traditional point-and-click titles. Sadly, despite fetching hand-drawn locations and a pleasant musical score, Heaven’s Hope fails to make the grade. MK